Let 's Start With A Story

Having the mind and determination to become successful isn’t an easy task. Success isn’t considered a gift, it should be a hard task to achieve and it matters how it is accomplished. Success

Success is a concept that is constantly altered and has a different meaning from person to person. The stereotypical definition of success would be someone who has a high-paying job or is in the upper-class. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers: The Story of Success, approaches the concept of success in a different and unique way. Gladwell discusses how opportunities, cultural legacy, and hard work all coincide with each other to produce real success. He uses mostly logic and multiple unrelated anecdotes to support and provide evidence for his statements. Gladwell's main argument is that although hard work and talent are essential for success, one’s given opportunities and cultural legacy is what really

My philosophy of success is simply being content with your life. To me personality, I still do not know what contentment is to me and that's fine. I can guess it is being independent, with a job I am passionate about and surrounded by people that truly care about me. Success is finding that point in life that, if things stayed like how they are at this moment then it would be alright. I'm not saying to stop improving yourself or that after that point nothing bad or better will happen. People should always try to improve themselves and in reality, bad things will always happen at one point. Therefor my philosophy is to work towards that feeling of contentment. It

Another area many people tend to aim to be successful in is the concept of the American Dream. It is thought that if you live in America you need to fulfill the goal of achieving the American Dream and if it is not achieved or not meant to be achieved then the life lived has been a failure. Older generations and even present generations want the younger generations to get good grades, have a ‘successful’ college life, get a professional job, get married, have kids, and buy a big, just because that is normal to everyone but some may choose to live their life not as vanilla. William Zinsser talks about how everyone just follows the social norm in order to be seen as successful, “Our advertisements and TV commercials are a hymn to material success, our magazines articles a toast to people who made it to the top... He is our national idol, and everybody else is our national fink” (Zinsser 601). Becoming a specific type of successful is being pushed onto teenagers who are still struggling to find out who they are and what they want to do. They may want to figure out a different way to become successful in their own independent way.

Obviously success is usually defined by how much money you have. In this day in age if you don’t have money you’re a failure; so go get

I feel that in order to achieve personal success in our society you need 3 key things. For one, you need to have determination. In our culture, we seem to have a universal ideology along the lines of “keep going, and you will succeed eventually.” I feel that these idea’s are incredibly true, and have been shown to be effective every time. A good example of this trait in one of the texts we read is in the Odyssey when Odysseus needed to get back home, and despite the odds being against him, he never gave up. He always kept going, and when the going got rough, he got back right up and started over again. Another trait is intelligence. Because we have gone away from warrior culture in modern times, academic success is more than mandatory to achieve

When most people (here in the US or anywhere else in the world) hear or talk about the United States, a common theme is living the “America Dream”. The “American Dream” is the idea that children will have a higher standard of living than their parents and in 1940, 92 percent of them did. But by 1980 that number decreased to 50 percent, in terms of absolute mobility. The term “successful” is a universal term and applies different for every single individual because everyone has different levels of success, some are higher then others and there can be some barriers in the way. There are many stories and evidence that have proven this theme but in the fine details there are many other things that come into play when it comes to becoming “successful”.

The meaning of "success" has numerous interpretations, whether it is your own or society's definition. Within Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell explains that being successful has nothing to do with what kind of person you are, so whether you are intelligent and hardworking or lazy and aloof, it depends on your circumstances growing up. Whether your parents happen to be immigrants, you are one of the smartest men in the country or you make a habit of practicing an activity for a certain amount of hours a day, your own personal success, according to Gladwell is defined by the conditions you grew up in; the idea of being successful varies from culture to culture, therefore, there is no definite meaning of success other than one's interpretation.

Having the desire to be successful is one thing but without the doing the little things you will never get there. Successful people are committed to doing something every single day. Regardless of what is going on in their lives they work on their craft. They overcome the daily battle between procrastination and motivation. Every day, most people have a list of things they want to do; need to do; or should do; and what they don’t want to do. It’s these daily choices that are influenced by our discipline and

Success comes from self-determination, motivation, and hard work – that was the message I received from reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell helped me understand that the outliers mentioned in the book didn’t gain their success easily. Some may have had lucky opportunities and where born in the right year, but they had to work hard, they were smart, and out of their achievements, they made an impact on society. Prior to reading Outliers, I was lost among the success of others because I thought these people came from wealthy families, which meant they had a head start, but I was wrong. Success has a different meaning to everyone, but the commonalities of success are the advantages and opportunities given to us.

To begin with, success does not necessarily mean having the best home in a city, or owning the car of the year. Everyone’s view of success can be very divergent. It can all depend on where a person stands, or what their past was like. For example, there can be students who might be the first in their families to attend college and getting a college degree can easily turn into their American Dream, it may even be their parents’ dream as well. In addition, the view of Individual opportunity for an undocumented homeless man may differ from the views of an American with a college degree. Owning a home, having

“The million dollar question to ask yourself is this: ‘Am I ready to have it all?’ If you can honestly answer a resounding ‘Yes!’ to this question, and if you are willing to go beyond your comfort zone to get it, ‘Super Sized Success’ is yours to possess.”

In my mind, the primary reason I need – not want – to succeed is to prove a point. For several generations now, my family has been stuck in a cycle. The men work themselves to exhaustion so that their families can eat, eventually leading to a loss of enjoyment in the things they did when they were younger as well as an appearance of eternal “grumpiness.” The women live solely for their children and feel useless beyond that field, never achieving any of their personal goals. The issue is not that no one intelligent or dedicated enough. Several family members even started and dropped out of college. I believe that the primary reason for this is a lack of support. Even I have received some resistance largely because not everyone understands or believes that our family can change its circumstances. Especially when I consider that I am the oldest of four, I know that I must lead the way so that others can break from the cycle and know that they can do whatever they

Personal success is defined by how content and enjoyable your life is. That is not to say that challenges and disappointments aren’t included in this. A rich, eventful and challenging life doing what you enjoy and positively affecting others seems to me to be just about right. Find a job you love and you’ll never work another day in your life. I know I won’t. In my

Throughout my life, I’ve realized my definition of success has been through achieving my goals to serve others and ultimately never stop learning. My work ethic and character traits have contributed to reaching my goals in high school and will prepare me for the future.